As my friends John Ross (on Moss) and Andrew Connell have mentioned already today, the new web portal for Orange County Public Schools has just gone live.

The team I work for was responsible for transitioning their website from a loose confederation of around 50 department managed websites into one unified Microsoft SharePoint 2007 publishing portal. I think the key differentiator for the site (compared to many other public SharePoint sites) is that it is maintaned not by a central team, but instead by these 50 departments and their respective employees. As for the initiative, I was primarily responsible for all of the public facing UI elements of the portal. This included several customized masterpages, layouts, tons of css, custom webparts, custom XSL transformations, and restyling of several out of the box webparts. We had a lot of fun working on the project, but there was also considerable pain as well. Our team owes a great debt to the entire SharePoint blogging community as a whole for getting us through these rough spots because when this project began there were very few official sources of information on SharePoint. So, thanks to all of you!